Review: "This Time It's Real" by Ann Liang

 

This Time It's Real by Ann Liang
Published February 2023 via Scholastic
★★★

If I'm remembering correctly, both of Liang's books to date can be summed up thusly:

• Girl feels lonely and isolated.
• Girl enlists the hottest and most eligible boy in school to help her with shenanigans that will benefit her a lot and him a little.
• Girl proceeds to spend the rest of the boy treating boy like a total inconvenience.
• Boy is instantly smitten because she's Not Like Other Girls and doesn't swoon and giggle every time he's in the vicinity.
• Minor complications with the shenanigans ensue.
• Girl admits that she does want Boy after all.
• Anything unethical Girl might have done is swept under the rug, and Girl and Boy have a happily-ever-after.

Let's be clear: this is not unlike a lot of YA fiction. It will work for a lot of readers. Books that could be two hundred pages shorter if the characters just had an honest conversation, though, have never been a good fit for me. I read this for the Beijing setting (I want more YA in non-Western settings! Or even just YA set in countries where English is not the default!), but there wasn't really enough by way of setting detail to keep me engaged or distracted from the stomp-and-glare-style romance.

A note on the Craneswift internship: It sounds wildly exploitative and unethical. The messaging Eliza gets from them is "If you don't bare your soul on our website every week, and also do any press we want about your relationship, you're worthless to us. What, you want to write about something else? Sure, you can try—but your first draft better be perfect. We don't work with our interns or have teachable moments. We just threaten to throw you out like the scum you are."

2.5 stars.